"Them persimmons weren't even ripe yet, either," Stove said--he was to repeat the same bewildered comment for years, whenever the name of Lee Hitch came up. That his friend had got himself butchered over green persimmons was a fact that never ceased to haunt him.

Call regretted the loss too. An able ranger had made a single mistake in a place where a single mistake was all it took to finish a man. It was the kind of thing that could have happened to Augustus, if whiskey bottles grew on bushes, like persimmons.

What troubled him continually was the impossibility of protecting hundreds of miles of frontier with just a small troop of men. The government had been right to build a line of forts, but now the civil war was rapidly draining those forts of soldiers. The frontier was almost as unprotected as it had been in the forties, when he and Augustus had first taken up the gun.

The Comanches had been in retreat, demoralized, sick, hungry--a few aggressive campaigns would have eliminated them as a threat to white settlement; but now, because of the war, progress had been checked. With so few fighting men to oppose them, the Comanches would raid again at will, picking and choosing from the little exposed ranches and farms. There had just been reports that a young chief had even ridden down the old war trail into Mexico, destroying three villages and costing the Mexicans many children.

It left Call with such a sense of futility that he and Augustus had even begun to talk of doing something else. They rarely had even fifty men under their command at any one time.

Though the Comanches were comparatively weak, the rangers were weaker still.

Meanwhile, to the south and west, the banditry raged unchecked. The more prominent cattlemen of south Texas--men such as Captain King--were virtually at war with their counterparts in Mexico, forced to employ large bands of well-mounted and well-armed riflemen in order to hold their ground.

To the east, where the war raged, the tide of battle was uncertain; no one could say whether North or South would win. Even those partisans in Austin who regarded General Lee as second only to the Almighty had muted their bragging now.

The struggle was too desperate--no one knew what would happen.

What Call did know was that his own men were tired. They had more ground to cover than any one group of men could reasonably be expected to cover, and, despite many promises, their mounts were still inadequate. Governors and legislators wanted the hostiles held in check and the bandits hung, but they wanted it all to be done with the fewest possible men on the cheapest possible horses. It irritated Call and infuriated Augustus.

"If I could I'd strike a deal with old Buffalo Hump," Augustus said at one point --admittedly he was well in his cups--?I'd bring him down and turn him loose in the legislature. If he scalped about half the damn senators I have no doubt they'd vote to let us buy some good horses." "How could they vote if they were dead?" Call asked.

"Oh, there'd soon be more legislators," Gus said. "I'd make the new ones dig the graves for the old ones. It would be a lesson to them." Meanwhile, the captive woman had not ceased or abated her shrieking. It was a cold, cloudy day, with a bitter wind. The woman's wild shrieking unnerved the men, the younger ones particularly. As Pea Eye watched, the woman tried to bite her own flesh, in order to pull her wrists free of their rawhide bonds. She bit herself so violently that blood was soon streaming down her horse's shoulders. Of course it did no good. Jake Spoon had tied the knots, and Jake was good with knots. It was Jake, of all the rangers, who seemed most disturbed by the woman's screaming.

"I wish we could just shoot her, Pea," Jake said. "If I had known she was going to bite herself and carry on like that I would have shot her to begin with." "I wouldn't want to shoot no woman, not me," Pea Eye said. He wished the sun would come out--af violent skirmishes his head was apt to throb for hours; it was throbbing at the time. He had a notion that if the sun would just come out his head might get a little better. His horse had a hard trot, which made his head pound the worse.

Jake Spoon, who was delicate and prone to vomits at the sight of dead people, couldn't tolerate the woman's shrieks. He plugged his ears with some cotton ticking he kept in his saddlebags for just such a purpose. Then he loped ahead, so he wouldn't have to see the blood from the woman's torn wrists dripping off her horse's shoulders.

"What's wrong with that boy?" Goodnight asked, when he saw the tufts of cotton sticking out of Jake Spoon's ears.

"Why, I don't know, Charlie," Augustus said. "Maybe he's just tired of listening to all this idle conversation."

Idahi had ridden all the way from the Big Wichita to the Arkansas River, looking for Blue Duck and his band of renegades; he wanted to join the band and become a renegade himself, mainly so he could go on killing white people and stealing their guns. Idahi would kill anybody, Indian or white, if they had guns that he wanted to shoot. He didn't consider himself a harsh or a particularly bloodthirsty man--it was merely that killing people was usually the easiest way to get their guns.

To his annoyance Idahi missed Blue Duck as he was travelling toward the Arkansas.

Several people had told him Blue Duck was camped on the Arkansas, when in fact he was camped on a sandy bend of the Red River, well east, where the river curved into the forests.

"Quicksand," Blue Duck informed him, when Idahi finally found his camp and asked why he was camping on the Red River. "There's bad sand along this stretch of the river. If the law tries to come at us from the south they'll bog their horses. We can shoot them or let them drown.

Five or six laws from Texas have drowned already." "If they drown, do you get their guns?" Idahi asked. He was from the Comanche band of Paha-yuca, whom Blue Duck had known long ago, when he was still welcome among the Comanche people. But Paha-yuca had agreed to take his people onto a reservation the whites had promised him.

Paha-yuca was old; what had made him agree to go onto the reservation was the news that the big war between the whites might soon end. The white soldiers were said to have reached an agreement to stop killing one another. At least that was the rumour, though there had been other such rumours in the last few years and they had not been accurate. But it was Paha-yuca's opinion that once the white soldiers stopped killing one another they would start killing Comanches again. The bluecoat soldiers would return to the empty forts stretching westward along the rivers. Many bluecoats would come, and this time they would come onto the llano and press the fight until there were no more free Comanches left to kill.

Paha-yuca was not a coward, nor was he a fool. Idahi knew that he was probably right in his assessment, right when he said that the People would no longer be able to live in the old ways. If they wanted to live at all they would have to compromise and live as the whites wanted them to. Also, they would have to stop killing whites--they could no longer just kill and scalp and rob and rape whenever they came across a few whites.